I recently picked up a SOTABeams BandHopper II and a Tactical Mini. My plan is to use these for some SOTA activations, however I didn’t want the first time I put the mast up to be on top of a mountain. Therefore, we set out to activate a park that doesn’t get a lot of love. In fact, it’s only been activated twice previously. The plan was simple, just to set up the mast and check everything is working – if we could complete the activation whilst we were there, then that’s a bonus.
I knew the antenna was working, as I’d previously used it for an activation at Jubilee Tower, however I specifically wanted to test that I could set up (and tear down!) the mast on my own, with no assistance.
I’m glad that I did this, because no way is setting up a mast for the first time on top of a mountain a good idea – but it was actually really simple to get set up. I extended the mast, laid it out of the ground, attached the guy wires and antenna and extended them to roughly where I thought they’d end up. I then pegged one guy wire into the ground and raised the mast. Whilst holding the mast in one hand I then pegged the opposite guy wire. This gave a little stability to allow me to peg the other two guy lines.
You can see from the photo that I have the guy lines pretty low on the mast – although the antenna itself also guys the top of the mast in two directions. The Bandhopper does come with a third guy point, but during setup I cut it off with a pocket knife because it just seemed more trouble than it was worth. I can always reattach it if necessary – but I don’t currently plan to.
Every activation brings its own problems and for this activation my FZ-M1 tablet was completely out of power and I had forgotten to bring along a proper battery. The only battery I had was a 5Ah Li-ion battery that I’d need to use to power (from zero) the tablet and the radio. That’s because the ICOM IC-705 only gives out 5W on the internal battery and the extra boost gives 10W. This actually worked perfectly. I seems the 5Ah battery had enough juice for the 47 minutes it took me to get the 10 minimum contacts for the activation at least!
It was 3°C with a cold wind during the activation, and since we were really only there to test the antenna setup we didn’t hang around past the 10 QSOs required. Tearing down the setup was just as easy as setting it up. Not quite as easy at setting up something like my Chelegance MC-750, but the inverted-V dipole should perform much better than the coil loaded vertical. The Bandhopper II (450g) and Tactical Mini (760g) are also both pretty darn lightweight too.
